


Marseille, 1942

by profoundalpacakitten



Series: Howlies [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: French History, Headcanon, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, War, World War I, this is not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:35:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23846098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/profoundalpacakitten/pseuds/profoundalpacakitten
Summary: "Jacques Dernier was a member of the French Resistance who went on to join the Howling Commandos during World War II, serving as the team's explosives expert."This is his story, how he grew up in rural France during WWI, How he joined Captain America's team. How he became a brilliant chemistry student in Marseille, lived the break out of WWII and the struggle of the French under the occupation; this is how he joined the Résistance, and why. How he was captured, and how he fought for his country.
Series: Howlies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2065449
Kudos: 4





	1. Septèmes, 1911-1918

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my very self-indulgent and absolutely unprompted Jacques Dernier headcanon fic.
> 
> I will try to add resources, links, embed picture or things I have found to base my fic on. Expect very lenghty endnotes, like woah.
> 
> I am french, so expect some text written in french. I will translate everything in the end notes or in hovertext. There might be extensive end notes because this is the fic equivalent of being hit over the head repeatedly with a history book.
> 
>  **What this fic is** : This is the instersection of the Venn diagram between "I fucking love History", "Oh who is this tertiary character over there who has two lines of dialogue" and "let's have a philosophical debate with myself about heroes, the price of war, peace, why fight"
> 
> This will also be later on a outsider view on America helping in WWII, Cap's team, but with a view from the sidelines and not Stucky with a peanut gallery, and a Stucky as seen from the eyes of someone else, because, yeah, sorry, Stucky ftw peeps.
> 
> This is also a fic that is outlined. This doesn't say much, but at least it means that I have some vague ideas on what I want to do with it, so... Yay?
> 
>  **What this fic is not** : It's not funny: like really really not. OMG. If you have read the first two fics I have posted here, and expect the same level of levity and humor, ooh boy are you in for a disappointment. Dernier's life can look fine sometimes but this guy has grown up when the Great War broke out, then in a politically unstable France that got invaded during WWII. I'm not striving for hilarity.
> 
> It's not finished: I am posting as I progress. because this is a pure headcanon coming directly from my mind to you, this fic might stall, maybe even for long stretches of time. The very lack of detailed headcanons on the Commando (if you have some existing links on AO3 drop them in the coments I'm curious) makes me think that any new chapter I post is one thing more to add to Jacques Dernier's character. So i'll update as I go and as ideas come to my mind.
> 
> And now, here it is. Love each one of you who dares to read this.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Birth and infancy during WWI.

Arthur Rimbaud, Le dormeur du val, october 1870

It is a pocket of greenery where a river sings  
Wildly hanging tatters of silver to the wild weeds;  
Where the sun, from the proud mountain  
Glowed : it is a small vale foaming with sunbeams.

A soldier, young, mouth open, head bare,  
And neck bathed in fresh blue watercress,  
Sleeps; he is lying in the grass under the blue,  
Pale in his green bed where light rains.

His feet in the gladiolas, he sleeps. Smiling like  
A sick kid would smile, he is slumbering :  
Nature, cradle him warmly : he is cold.

Perfumes do not make his nostrils shiver ;  
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his chest  
Tranquil. He has two holes in his right side.  


| 

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière  
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons  
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,  
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,  
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,  
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe sous la nue,  
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme  
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :  
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;  
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine  
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.  
  
---|---  
  
* * *

Jacques Dernier was born in 1911, the last of six brothers and five sisters, after one of the seasonal March hail showers1, in the village of Septèmes2. The midwife had shooed René Dernier outside the room as soon as Henriette Dernier had yelled at her to throw his ass outside.

“Flanquez-le dehors!” she’d cried, and the stern glare of the midwife had sent him scurrying to the adjacent room, where two of his brothers and his best friend were starting a game of belote while talking about the last storms. Jackie, the oldest of René’s brothers, was grumbling about some guy he knew over in Martigues whose fields had been flooded. Aimé, René’s second brother, was rolling his cigarette as René’s best friend dealt the cards and the little wooden belote chips, so well-used and well-loved that the markings had chipped away and the colors looked faded.

  
Châteauneuf-les-Martigues, 1911, main square in front of the town house.  |    
Old belote chips   
---|---  
  
Jacques was a healthy baby, and his godfather paid for the notice of his birth in the next issue of _Le Petit Marseillais_ 3. His family was proud, and they even paid for a picture to be taken of the family a year later. Baby Jacques’s face was overexposed, but Henriette proudly hung the picture in the dining room of the farm.

  
A family picture in 1914

He was three when war broke out. It was the height of summer, and he was piling stones in the front yard as his sisters were running with their friends, yelling children's songs. The sun was shining, people were in the fields. Henriette was at the market, having a talk with one of the ladies from church. They were laughing. Then an automobile rode in. A man got down. A soldier.

And Henriette Dernier clutched at her chest, because she knew, she’d guessed, and she seen it in a nightmare last night, adn René had said that’s okay. He’d hugged her tight but she had known, she had known.

The soldier tacked a cardboard paper onto the public announcement board, and his fellow soldier friend cleared his throat.

She’d known that, after sunny days always came rainy ones.

  
French mobilisation orders for WWI, dated the 2nd of August, 1914.

“ _By decree of the Président de la République, the mobilisation of the land and sea army is put in order, as well as the requisition of all animals, coaches and saddlery necessary to the outfitting of those armies._ ”

Jacques was too young to understand, and too young to know. Too young to see his father and mother, embracing his older brother Marius, who had only just come back from his military service. He scribbled a cross in his pudgy hand, at the end of the letters the family sent to his other brother Jean, whose service had been discontinued so he could go serve.

He never was to know them.

The war was far away still, and seemed justified; they needed to get Alsace and Lorraine back. René believed that, while Henriette worried. And it was supposed to end in a matter of months, the government said. It would be finished by the winter and the troops would be home for Christmas of 1914. Henriette prepared Christmas dinner for the whole family, but Marius and Jean’s places remained empty.

The war would take a year at most. Maybe two. Jacques didn’t understand, he was too young. René soothed Henriette.

His first real memory was one of worry; all the assembled Dernier family gathered for dinner one night, his father René at the head of the table, reading _Le Petit Marseillais_ to everyone, his mother serving tonight’s poule au pot4. He remembered the scent of boiled chicken and the richness of poultry fat and cooked potatoes and carrots in the air. Jacques could not recall precisely what had been happening that night in 1915, just that his mother had gasped, and his father had tried to be reassuring.

Then René Dernier had gone to war and all the family had said goodbye on the farmhouse’s doorstep. His mother had cried, but Jacques had shaken his handkerchief in the wind like crazy to say goodbye to his father and his uncle Jackie. It was a sunny day. [Cicadas were singing in the garrigue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69NWQwpEOLM)5.

The war never ended. The year was 1916. Jacques saw his mother cry, several times, after receiving letters. So he went to the garrigue and picked up some flowers, leaving no stem at all because his mother needed colors, not dumb green stems. He gave her the flowers and she hugged him close.

Then 1917 passed. The war wasn't ending.

Jacques was only seven in 1918, and was learning to read with the almanach and issues of _Le Petit Marseillais_. The words sort of made sense in a way, although the war notices were opaque to him.

Jackie died, like Marius, like Jean, and like thirty-six other sons, brothers and fathers of Septèmes.

René came back in 1918. Or, at least, part of him came back. Another part had died there in the mud of the Somme. He couldn’t hug anyone anymore, but “at least he still had his whole face,” they said in the village centre when Jacques went to buy bread for his mother. And Jacques knew, because he’d seen the gueules cassées6, two of them in Septèmes, disfigured and terrifying.

Jacques was seven when he learnt the price of war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. **Hail showers** in France happen very often around March (or happened before global warming, eh). Bouts of rain with very small hail are often interspersed with rainy episodes that peter out in April.
> 
> 2\. **Septèmes** is a real place, a small village now called [Septèmes-les-Vallons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sept%C3%A8mes-les-Vallons), in the South of France. It isn't far from Marseille, around an hour and twenty minutes bike ride, which at the time, accounting for roads not being as good as they are now, would be a two hour bike ride maybe? Also 39 men really died in the Great War in Septèmes.
> 
> I chose Septèmes for Dernier's birthplace because it's not that far from Marseille (which is where Marvel says he's joined the Résistance at some point), it's rural (1 800 inhabitants or so in those years), and it had some interesting History facts listed on its french Wikipedia page, that I can use later on.
> 
> 3\. **[Le Petit Marseillais](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Petit_Marseillais)** is a real daily newspaper that was published from 1868 to 1944 in Marseille. Of course getting your name published, be it for an obit or a birth announcement, was the coolest thing ever. So this bit is just to set up the fact that Jacques had a well-off godfather living in Marseille.
> 
> 4\. **Poule au pot** , literally _Chicken in a pot_ , is a typical boiled chicken dish with potatoes, carrots, turnips and leeks cooked in the chicken stew. It is _fucking **delicious**_ btw. Legend has it in France that Henri IV , in 1600 or so, declared that "every ploughman in his realm, shall have a chicken in his pot". It's just a legend but damn, when you're a little french child having a poule au pot cooked by your granny, you can bet your ass she's going to talk your ear off about Henri IV.
> 
> 5\. **Garrigue** is a [type of landscape and environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrigue) that you can find in southern France. To a French person (I mean, a northern French person, because Southerners will be like "hon hon this is la garrigue hon hon it's the best landscape"), this word will mostly be associated with limestone yellow soil, cicadas and crickets shrilly singing under a scorching sun, schrubs and low, windswept pine trees, gnarled olive trees and a very specific smell of dusty earth and sundried wild rosemary.
> 
> 6\. **Les Gueules Cassées** , literally _the broken mugs_ or _broken faces_ , was the name given to survivors of the Great War, who had come back from the front horribly disfigured. It's both a fucking tragedy and also a huge black mark on France's past dealing with veterans, you can't even imagine. WWI, for France, is **1.45 million dead or missing** and an estimated **1.9 million wounded**. Villages, towns and cities had been drained of their men and thus, from the majority of their workforce (like approximately 30% of the active male workforce). On the heels of that war came the Spanish Flu, which killd 240 000 people in France. Northern France was in ruins, Southern France wasn't faring much better and the country has been bled dry (most countries in Europe faced a similar, sometimes even worse toll in terms of population percentage; Russia was a fucking disaster).
> 
> With WWI, war had progressed technologically: shelling and mustard gas caused devastating wounds, and the head, exposed, would take the brunt of it. But medicine had progressed enough that a piece of shrapnel breaking your jaw wasn't a death sentence anymore. It was just a sentence to life-disfigurement.
> 
> They estimated that between 10 000 and 15 000 young men came back with their gueules cassées. Parts of the jaw missing, cheekbones torn, no nose, or lips, or ears. Google it at your own risks: high-key TW for wounds. The Ministère des anciens combattants, which would be the equivalent of the department for veteran's affairs, saw the light of day because of WWI and the fact that now, people survived. And they didn't survive well. Called the "sous-secrétaire d'État au Contentieux et Pensions", or state under-secretary for litigations and pensions, it quickly came under fire because at first they - and I swear, this is a fucking hundred years too late to get angry about it but, fuck those guys - didn't recognize the Gueules Cassées as veterans.
> 
> Fuck you Poincaré (that was the head of state at the time, the asshole).


	2. Gardanne, 1926

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jacques Dernier at fifteen.

Marcel Pagnol, La Gloire de Mon Père, 1957

Another memory of Aubagne, was the boules game under the plane trees on the avenue. My father, amongst other giants, executed prodigious leaps and bounds, and threw an iron ball at unfathomable distances. Sometimes, there were applauds, then the giants always ended up quarreling, because of a string they ripped off one another’s hands, but they never fought.

| 

Un autre souvenir d'Aubagne, c'est la partie de boules sous les platanes du Cours. Mon père, parmi d'autres géants, faisait des bonds prodigieux, et lançait une masse de fer à des distances inimaginables. Parfois, il y avait de grands applaudissements, puis les géants finissaient toujours par se disputer, à cause d'une ficelle qu'ils s'arrachaient des mains, mais ils ne se battaient jamais.  
  
---|---  
  
Jacques was applying himself. He hated Flaubert with a passion and writing a composition on Madame Bovary was akin to torture but, eh; he’d already had chemistry — so incredibly cool — and land surveying today, so the suffering felt kind of balanced out.

His Sergent-Major nib scratched his exercise book and he hissed. Jean, sitting right next to him, hissed back, “Ta gueule.”

  
A pupil writing with his Sergent-Major nib and case, the inkwell was traditionnally inserted into the pulpits

Asshole.

He hurriedly soaked up the excess ink with his blotting paper and then clacked his teeth at Jean, grimacing like a feral dog. Jean boggled at him and recoiled, and Jacques, satisfied, got back to finishing his composition.

Jean Durand was a mouth-breather anyway, and he had only continued studying after the [Certificat d’Études](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificat_d%27%C3%A9tudes_primaires) because his parents didn’t know what else to do with him. A no-good farmer flunking maths, science and French, ha!

Monsieur Moreau was passing between the benches, checking that no one was cheating, and Jacques was watching him from the corner of his eye to make sure that he still had at least a few minutes left. He stressfully dotted the last full stop and sighed, relieved. Jean grated out a “Fucking shut up!” in a low voice, so as not to be heard, and Jacques’s only reply was to hold up his finished composition and then flip him off triumphantly.

  
Pupils at an École primaire supérieure for boys. The École primaire supérieure would cover school years for 14 to 17 year-olds and was not compulsory. It was a way for poorer families to still give their children a way to further their education and get a better job. The École primaire supérieure was free and secular, like all schools were in France since 1905.

Jean gasped and turned to raise his hand, but Jacques was quicker and made a show of wiping his nib clean and tidying up the case in the pencil box that his godfather Bertrand had given him for Christmas, in 1924.

“Monsieur?” Damn, Jean’s voice was so irritating.

“Durand?”

“Dernier has flipped me off.”

Jacques made a show of raising his head slowly as if surprised, and looked at the school teacher, his mouth a perfect O of astonishment. “I didn’t! Durand was talking to me! I think he wanted to-”

The teacher raised his hand to stop him, which made him look like a big, wary crow, in his all-black attire. “Boys.” He checked his pocket watch. “Stop writing!” he called to the whole class, which elicited some groans and low cries of distress. Jean looked down at his exercise book and the unfinished composition dejectedly while Jacques closed his and raised it over his head so that the teacher could grab it.

Jacques half stood up from the wooden bench to look out the dusty window and saw Fanfan scurrying across the schoolyard to go ring the bell. Fanfan was a simpleton, but he was Gardanne's simpleton, and the villagers had promptly found him a job at the school because he was a gentle soul with an uncanny sense of timing, and not much else. Jacques liked Fanfan; he rang nice tunes with the bell and sometimes they shared hard candies, even though the man might have been in his late forties.

The teacher let them go, and Jacques grabbed his books in a hurry, cinching the belt that held them together, stashed his pencil box in his satchel, and took care to empty his inkwell into the ink bottle that Monsieur Moreau shoved under his nose.

Jacques ran out with all the other boys, sending a V-sign Jean’s way. His bicycle was leaning on the dry masonry wall with the others; he climbed onto it and waved goodbye to some of his friends, especially Jacquot and Momo, who were scuffling in the sandy dust that the mistral wind had deposited in the schoolyard. He yelled to them, and his voice cracked, as per usual these days.

  
A boy and his bike, circa 1920

He pedaled like hellhounds were on his trail, mumbling a running commentary to himself, like the articles about the Tour de France he had read the other day, speaking like Marcel Laporte on the radio. One indignant Gardanne lady had to dodge his mad race to the village’s limits.

As he passed the last house of Gardanne, he raised his hands from his handlebars and saluted the lavender fields and a small group of goats that had climbed a figtree, cheering for himself like the commentator on the radio. “And Jacques Dernier, fabulous sprint to the finish line! Marvelous form; look at Toulon cheering for our winnerrrrrrrrrrr!!”

He waved at an olive tree, “Thank you Toulon!” and took his handlebars back as he swerved onto the pebbled and dusty public lane.

He had had the time to recite all his irregular English verbs, damn those, before he stopped some way ahead of Septèmes. His button-down shirt was drenched in sweat, with the afternoon sun pounding on his neck and the right side of his face the whole time. Next to one of the outbound farmhouses, he noticed Paulette in her yellow dress picking up figs and dropping them into her apron. What was she…? Hahah!

“Hi Paulette!” he yelled loudly and obnoxiously.

She jumped up, startled, and whirled around towards him. He waved, and she gulped down the mouthful of fig she’d been scarfing before he’d surprised her.

“Damn you, Jaja! My heart nearly beat out of my chest!”

He smiled and leaned on a nearby wooden post. “Care to share?” His voice cracked in the middle of the sentence.

Paulette rolled her eyes heavenward. “If I share some with you, I’ll go back home with none. And then who’s going to have a spanking tonight, huh? Not you, mister.”

“Please,Paulette…” He opened his mouth widely, waiting to be fed like a baby bird.

She snorted, then pelted him with two figs. One hit him in the arm and another in the face. He screamed and laughed out loud, and then a third one hit him in the chest and left a smear of purplish-red fig flesh. “Oh, god! My mother is going to kill me!”

“Serves you right, Dernier!”

He snickered and picked up the fallen figs, ate one quickly and then put the other two in his satchel, hoping they wouldn’t get squished. He rode into the village, mumbling again about the finish line on the Champs-Elysées, reached the other side of Septèmes and skidded into his parents’ farmhouse front yard. He waved hello to his papa, who was chewing tobacco and looking blankly at the afternoon sun.

He ran up to the door and banged inside. “[Maman](https://fr.forvo.com/_ext/ext-prons.js?id=2138640)! I’m home!” He brushed his sweaty curls out of his eyes and ran his hand over his face, feeling the grit of dust and sweat.

Nobody was in the front room, but he heard voices coming from further into the house. He shrugged and plonked his satchel on the buffet, retrieving the figs and then snatching an apple from a fruit dish. He went to the bathroom and had a perfunctory wash with some of the water left in the jug there.

Feeling quite accomplished, he bit into his apple and tip-toed into the living room, being careful not to make a sound.

“Can we even trust those hussards noirs? Bertrand. He would have to… to rub elbows with those heathens everyday!” That was his mother. Well, no surprise here, she had never liked the secular teachers and their ways.

“Henriette, come on, you know he loves school.”

“He might, but I’m down to four boys now and two of my girls, one of which can’t seem to be able to settle. So excuse me if I am concerned about his soul being damned.”

“Henriette. If he goes on to get his Certificat, he could be a good worker, maybe he could work here at the Delta Cuivre plant. But if he goes there… he could be an engineer!”

What the hell was going on, [putain](https://fr.forvo.com/_ext/ext-prons.js?id=2138640)?

“Come on, Bertrand, we don’t have that kind of money, and what are you saying, that I should make him hope he could have a spot at the Grand Lycée?”

  
The bernardin chapel of the lycée Thiers, which was still known as the Grand Lycée (literally Big High School) back in 1926. This was, and still is, a very good high school, and places in lycée Thiers were, and still are, highly sought after.

“He could.” There was a bit of silence, during which Jacques gulped down his bite of apple, no longer hungry. “I know someone. Jacques could come live with me in Marseille and-”

“D’accord.” Jacques felt his heart get tight as he heard the rolled r of his mother assenting to sending him away. “D’accord. We let him finish this year of school, we’ll need to wait for harvest, and then René’s payment from the plant and his pension. At least two months, because I cannot let you pay for everything.”

“He loves chemistry. He’ll be a fantastic chemist or engineer. You’ll see. You’ll be so proud.”

“I am already. I’m just sorry that God decides that the paths you all take to being good men require me to make sacrifices.” Jacques grimaced, still unsure about what he was feeling. “And you are sure that if there is a war, they won’t draft engineers?”

“Always the last to be drafted, don’t worry.”

There was a second or two of silence. “I can’t have my trésor chéri be drafted. Pardi, I cannot, Bertrand.” Her voice broke.

And Jacques decided he’d had enough. He ran out of the house and took a turn into the fallow land to the left, ducked under several rows of grape vine trellises, then ran up the small hill between the rows, turned left again, and barrelled into the village. At this hour, he knew his sister Marthe would be with her friends, the Other Marthe and the sweet girl everyone called Bichette, because she was cute, but didn’t have two brain cells to rub together.

He ran like a crazed man and made a detour at the knife-grinder’s for several minutes to go talk to him, then he ended up on the paved main square of the village, where — hah! Here they were.

“Marthe!”

“Hey brother!” She smiled sunnily at him.

“Hi Tatie, hi Bichette!” Bichette giggled. “Marthe, maman plans to pair you up with Jamie at the next bal musette. She says she’s worried you might end up a [Catherinette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherinette) in November at this rate.”

  
A bal populaire around 1920 or 1930. Those village dance parties were organised in villages or town and were a way for young people to meet each other, and mostly to mingle with people from neighbouring villages. The tradition, already existed for a long time, but WWI and its sudden decline in available men, rendered those dances all the more important in community life. Women were calld spinsters (or Catherinette) after 25, and men needed to get paired up. Popular dances helped solve that issue... somewhat.

Her friends gasped as Marthe’s smile crumbled. “She what? Oh my god…” Next to her, the Other Marthe clucked her tongue. “Jamie is a fucking idiot. I saw him beat up a dog, once.”

Yeah, everyone knew he had beat up that dog, ugh, their rumours were stale. “Don’t worry, I have a plan, though!”

No way was he going to Marseille without a bit of payback. His maman and godfather had probably been hashing out the last details of how he would be sent away when he was talking to the knife-grinder, a very charming, shy and soft spoken guy who happened to be Marthe’s age.

He also happened to be a gueule cassée. Poor lad had been drafted on his eighteenth birthday in 1918 and had been blown up the minute he’d set foot in a trench.

Marthe never had gotten over her crush on the man. Even now, in his present state. “Jacques, I can’t go there.”

“Well, yes you can, soeurette! Come on, he’s waiting for you.”

“What do you mean, waiting for me?”

She forced him to a stop as he was dragging her towards the open shop where the guy was currently grinding one of many scythes, to get ready for the harvest in two months.

“Okay so, I did a thing.”

“Oh God, Jacques…”

“Listen Marthe!” He grabbed her hands and looked into her soft brown eyes, the same soft brown eyes every Dernier had, the color of wet limestone. “Marthe, there aren’t many guys left in Septèmes, I know, you know, we all know. He has a trade, he doesn’t beat people up, or dogs, even. He managed to domesticate a magpie, and he chats to it. He likes Adolphe Bérard and can sing like him, and he likes the colour blue.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. “What?”

“Told you everything I could, now go for it.”

He used all his fifteen-year-old muscles to push her towards the shop, where Robert the knife-grinder had stopped grinding, looking at them impassively. Half of his face was covered with some kind of leather mask, which hid the cheekbone he’d lost in the war. The other, still-pristine half of his face was that of a young-looking twenty-seven-year-old man, with dreamy eyes like the garrigue sky and jet-black hair like the feathers of the magpie he’d tamed. Marthe stumbled over to him, still reeling from the information that Jacques had dumped on her.

That night, when his maman told him she wanted to send him to live with his godfather, he hugged her. He cried a bit, too. He loved his godfather, but he was no replacement for his maman, or even his papa, as aloof as he was. He cried that night and the nights after. He cried for the garrigue and the fallow land and goats in the figtree.

Then, two months later, Marthe announced that she had found someone right before maman brought up the bal musette at dinner, and he smirked but stayed mum.

And his smirk only got wider, the louder his maman grew over the fact that Marthe was “going to marry that ugly falabraque! Boudiou !” The dinner devolved in one terrible fight and Jacques shared a commiserating look with his papa over their soup, feeling quite vindicated.

Okay, _now_ he could go live in Marseille if they wanted him to.

* * *


End file.
